Right Here with You
Bringing Mindful Awareness into Our Relationships
Shining the light of mindfulness on your relationship may not cure every problem in it, but it will enable you to approach it with an enhanced sense of reality—and mindful awareness will often reveal the suffering we assign to the relationship to be surprisingly insubstantial. This collection, by 30 of today’s most popular Buddhist teachers and writers (and a few non-Buddhists—since mindfulness doesn’t “belong” to Buddhism… ) applies awareness to every aspect of relationships: the joyous parts; the difficult parts; the beginning, middle, and end.
The Mysterious Life of the Heart
Writing from The Sun about Passion, Longing, and Love
In fifty personal essays, short stories, and poems that originally appeared in The Sun, some of the magazine’s most talented writers explore the enigma of love. With unremitting candor, they take us on a journey through ecstasy and heartbreak, anger and forgiveness, fleeting crushes and lasting relationships. The result is an unforgettable tapestry of love: vibrant, messy, mysterious, and enduring. James Kullander’s essay, “My Marital Status,” is included in this collection.
The Best Buddhist Writing 2008
“Memoir is not a traditional form in Buddhism, yet it is developing in the modern world into a powerful tool of empathy and understanding. You will be inspired and moved, as I am, by the personal stories told in this book. Here, heart and mind are joined in…James Kullander’s journey though a loved one’s death….”
From the Introduction by Melvin McLeod, Best Buddhist Writing 2008 and editor and editor-in-chief of the Shambhala Sun and Buddhadharma: The Practitioners Quarterly.
“In the last 50 years, Buddhism, the philosophy that complements all traditions and competes with none, has become an American cultural phenomenon earning its own annual anthology. The 2008 volume, fifth in the series, reveals again through breadth and elegance the watersheds and rivulets of the ancient practice as it joins America’s mainstream. The luminaries are here: Thich Nhat Hanh, Sylvia Boorstein, the Dalai Lama, Pema Chödrön, Natalie Goldberg, John Daido Loori and five distinguished rinpoches, among others. Their guidance in texts and concepts is rich for varied stages of practice. Most touching, though, and most indefinably American, are first-person accounts of responses to life and its constant changes: James Kullander loses a former spouse; Aidan Delgado becomes a conscientious objector to the war in Iraq; Hannah Tennant-Moore confronts cadavers. These private views make it especially easy to see Buddhism’s current flowing with grace into everyday lives. Finally, revered teacher Joanna Macy’s short piece “Gratitude,” from her updated classic World as Lover, World as Self, lights a way for us to live with our planet, an essay not to be missed. (Oct.)”
From Publishers Weekly. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.